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12 sources to find corporate and foundation grant opportunities

We have done the work for you to find websites that provide sources for corporate and foundation grants. One of the best websites listing resources on a variety of grants — government and private — is posted on About.com.

This Grantsmanship Center website holds the mother lode for a grantwriter. A map with clickable states takes you to lists of the following types of grantmakers in your state: top grantmaking foundations, community foundations, corporate giving programs and the homepage of every state government. The Center has paid subscriptions and other services that can be bought, but the free services are very good as well.

Community Foundations will require a blog post of their own, but if you want to visit their websites, you can when you click on the Grantsmanship Center’s map of the states.

Similar to the Grantsmanship Center, the Foundation Center has paid and free services, and the latter are quite good. You can sign up for free newsletters, including the RFP Bulletin which lists current grant announcements.

Grantstation requires a paid membership for searches, but you can sign up for a newsletter that posts current grant opportunities.

The Nonprofit Times offers a free searchable database of corporate donations.

Fundsnet gives you a searchable index by topic as well as recently announced grant opportunities.

Don Griesmann on Charity Channel provides lists of open grant opportunities. You have to join, but it’s free. Here is a sample grant list.

The internet offers grant resources that have been collected by type of grant sought.

The School Grants website has a list of government and foundation funders of educational projects along with other grantwriting resources.

Another place where grants for education are posted is Grants Alert. You can sign up to receive updates by email.

The organization Connect for Kids lists grants for organizations serving children.

The Community of Science website says it will “search the world’s most comprehensive funding resource, with more than 25,000 records representing nearly 400,000 opportunities, worth over $33 billion.”

The University of North Carolina provides grant leads for researchers.

In many cases, you may have to further filter or elaborate upon the information you receive through these collections of grant sources. Grantseeking is labor-intensive, but the payoff can be great. Good luck.

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Don’t count on political intervention to get a government grant

August 2, 2009 | Posted in: Grantwriting, Nonprofits | Tags: funding decisions, government grants, grant funding, grant writing, Grantwriting, judging, nonprofit, not-for-profit, proposal scores, request for proposal, RFP, scoring, scoring criteria, selection criteria, We Write For You, wewriteforyou.com, winning grants |

I have never been around a grant where a politician has influenced which applicant gets funded. These days, government grant administrators have become insulated from political intervention. They use outside experts — variously called reviewers, readers or evaluators — to read and score proposals, removing themselves from the ultimate decision.

Grant administrators include the maximum points allotted for each section in their Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Under open government provisions, all applicants can request section scores and comments provided by reviewers. Several grantors routinely supply scores and reviewer comments anyway.

When I ran state grant programs, no politician ever pressured me to fund a competing applicant. That said, I was questioned a couple of times, after-the-fact, why an applicant was not funded. It was comforting to show the ranking of scores and the cut point where we ran out of grant funds to award.

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In grant competitions, well-written is not enough

July 28, 2009 | Posted in: Competitive Writing, Grantwriting | Tags: Fundraising, grant details, grant writing, Grantwriting, judging, nonprofit, not-for-profit, proposal scores, RFP, RFP requirements, scoring, scoring criteria, We Write For You, wewriteforyou.com, winning grants |

Winning the grant is all about the score.

An acquaintance asked me to look at his nonprofit’s grant application and tell him why it wasn’t funded in a recent grant competition.

Before even looking at the proposal, I reminded him that the process was highly competitive and he was in good company with other fine, but unfunded, proposals.

“We hired a professional writer to make sure that the proposal was well written with no grammatical errors. We thought that would make us good,” he said.

He was right that proposals that are hard to understand or have grammatical errors wind up in the low end of the ranking. In grant competitions, however, a well-written proposal is only one factor influencing the application’s score.

The problem with the proposal in question jumped out at me almost immediately. The writer, not having written a grant proposal before, did not understand the scoring system. She had to fit answers to questions into a document with a required, 6-page limit. She used a disproportionate amount of space on low-scoring questions, and very little space on questions that carried a high score. (more…)

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